I wrote this answer to a petition against violations of womens rights in Afghanistan:

I’m sorry. There are 3 things that cause me not to sign and forward this.

Firstly, I am sceptical of the effect of this type of thing, and sceptical of the need to bulk mail this type of message. I will, in principal, only sign such things when I personally know, or someone I trust, knows the person collecting and delivering these statements. Otherwise, there is simply too high a chance that it is a fraud, it will be misrepresented or otherwise abused.

Secondly, I am convinced that the United Nations knows and accepts that people all over the world (including myself) are horrified by the treatment of women in Afghanistan. They don’t need an e-mail petition to tell them.

Thirdly, and probably most importantly, I think the way the international media is singling out Afghanistan as opposed to other countries is atrocious. The fervour to ally itself with Russia, well knowing that Russian Human Rights Violations in Chechnya are insane. The sudden desire to become a close ally with Afghanistans neighbour Uzbekistan, although Uzbekistan is one of the largest oppressors of Human Rights in the world. Lead by an effective state dictator, bigotry, oppression of women and imprisonment and execution of the opposition, as well as other problems are rife in Uzbek society. These are only a few examples of the US allying itself with nations harbouring terrorists, and having a less than perect human rights record (Syria and Iran are suddenly becoming friends of G.W.B.) Yet, in it’s war against one particular terrorist, and one particular breach of Human Rights, the US (and EU) is allying itself with nations that in no way support the message that this is a war against terrorism as a whole, and against Human Rights breaches as a whole.
I cannot accept that kind of political maneauvering and lying by the US government, anymore than I can accept it of my own.

If this is a war against Human Rights breaches and terrorism world-wide it is paramount that George W. Bush and his western allies make it clear that they will not accept the bombings of Chechnya (unconditionally) or the human rights breaches of Pakistan, Uzbekistan and others. Unfortunately they aren’t willing to do that, because this is effecively a war against the Taleban and Ossama bin Laden, and NOT a war against Terrorism.

Just wrote a medium long post about life, pressed the wrong button and voila… disparu….

I think I was trying to say something about beinga freelancer, working on your own and spending more time trying to sell yourself than actually doing any real work. My conclusion is that that probably isn’t what I really want to be doing.
I’m thinking about taking a slightly longer contract, working full-time as a project manager or technical project manager. Try to challenge myself again, work in a team, on a project with a tangible target. Developp something, and make more money in the process.

Although it feels really good to have an idea for a non-profit, working with interesting technology, tackling a real-world problem (the Digital Divide), it’s not going to pay my bills for quite some time. I need something else to do that brings in money. In the meantime, I need to develop the idea for our little Digital Divide project, look for funding, research and build up the necessary contacts. It’s a tough combination, but I see little choice but to try and combine full-time work with art-time idealism, no matter how naive or plain silly it sounds in my own ears.

I hope to be able to tell you more about my idealism and specific plans soon. I just need to write it down
The good part about working on a non-profit is that you don’t have to worry about someone stealing your plans. In fact if I caould make someone steal my plans and implement them, that would be an almost perfect success. So no NDA’s, no lawyer talk, just plain old ideas and inspiration.
The bad side of course is thatnon-profit, means non-profit.

Hmmm… My grandfather just told me yesterday, that nobody should expect to be rich before they’re 40. Rich in terms of family, experiences, memories, love, and the ability to afford a good comfortable lifestyle. That gives me years to live out my idealist dreams, and then some more years to try and make the money. No hurries then. I’m cool!

Sometimes the world strikes me as an evil, superficial and generally less than optimal place to be.

The recent events.
The terror attack on NYC.
The subsequent militaristic speeches by various heads of state.
The increase in crime against people of different ethnicity in my own peaceful homecountry.
The seemingly widely supported idea, that by attacking and killing more innocent people terrorism can be stopped.
The feeling that because some people in the developing world are violent, psychopathic fanatics, we should cut severely in our development aid budgets.
The justifications for cutting civil liberties.

All these things ominously combine to make me feel a lot less optimistic than I did a few weeks ago.

It has also been a lesson in the dangers of complacency, of relying to heavily on my elected government, or any other people to represent my values.

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” – Edmund Burke

To me that means that as long as good men (I happily and selflessly include myself in that category or women wear their values as underwear, the values of those in power, those of less tolerance and those of a more violent desparation will shine all the brighter for it.

- I believe very strongly in the need to do something about the disparaties between the rich and the poor in this world.
- I believe almost fanatically in the rights of every human on this planet (and elsewhere of course).
- I am intent on tolerance as the number one value in an increasingly intolerant world.

But so far I have carried this belief inside me, keeping it to myself, analysing it, thinking about it, but only rarely sharing it.
Maybe it’s because I grew up in a society where peoples beliefs, religious or otherwise, are considered a personal matter.
Maybe it’s just the fact that I’m a bit of a coward.
The fact remains that every day I read the news and it represents breeches in those values. By individuals, by governments (western as well as others) and by organisations (those considered terrorist as well as many considered tolerant). Only rarely do I read about actions taken and words spoken that live up to my values.

I am not doing anyone a favour by keeping those values to myself.

Working a “normal” job in the IT industry is rewarding in many ways.
So far it has paid well, it’s been fun, it’s allowed me to work with great people, and challenged myself intellectually.
But it’s hardly a clear cut channel for my values.

But my work is such an important part of my identity that more often that not, I forget my values in my quest to be confirmed in that identity.
I want to be good at what I do, because I get a lot of satisfaction from that positive feedback.
Because my job is so important to my identity, I need to be constantly confirmed that I do it well.

But am I proud to go out there and say, I’m a damn good consultant in Mobile Internet? Not in the long run.

I guess I am trying to redefine not who I am, but who I am perceived to be.
I’d rather be thought of as “that idealistic, naive socialist who thinks he can actually change anything in the world”, than “that excellent IT consultant with the general skills and the great understanding of business and technology” or whatever it is they think about me.

I’m proud to live in Denmark for a variety of reasons.
Most of those reasons involve the fact that the Danish system places a high priority on maintaining a financially equal society where the difference between rich and poor is amongst the smallest in the world.
This seems to make people think of us as a socialist. If socialism is what makes it so, and socialism is what ensures that we are one of the countries spending the largest proportion of GDP on foreign aid, so be it.

I am less proud of being Danish when it comes to integration.
The right-wing parties that seem to want to declare a general ban on Islam, rather than think about how to succesfully integrate people with different cultural backgrounds.
The outspoken fanatics that seem willing to pick up the rocks, throw them at muslim stores and burn down the mosques, in a horrid “Krystalnacht” type scenario.
The few fanatical danes, that just like the few fanatical muslims, are relaying the wrong picture of the masses.
They scare me.

I keep returning in my mind to the nightmare scenario. What if a terrorist attack were to hit the danish parliament?
Would there be enough danes to march through the streets, smash the windows of muslim stores, and burn down the mosques.
And what support would that kind of action get with the general public.

How far are we away from that kind of scenario? Not far enough in my opinion.

I want to do something. I want my actions to represent my values in some sense. I want to be able to say that I, for one, am not complacent. But I’m not sure I have the will, the courage and the balls to do it.

But I’ll give it a try Wish me luck!

So, I moved into new offices. It’s an open-plan office called First Cube.

It’s good to be out of the bedroom, other people around, and it’s a lot easier to focus.

I’m starting to look seriously at some Digital Divide project. I think a combination of recent world events, and not having quite as much fun as an independent consultant as I was expecting, has made me want to do something worthwhile again.

After my stay in Ghana, I think I’ve really wanted to get back into that business.

So here I am. I have some nice ideas, that I belive in, and I really hope I can find some funding. Well, it’s definitely worth a shot. Especially since I finally found someone here in Copenhagen who is willing to go in the same direction.

Well, I’ll tell you more, when I know more.

In the mean time, let’s be careful out there!

Frustration seems to be the dominant trend of the moment!
A million doors are open to me, but the event horizon is fading fast.

My first instinct in these situations is to go by my gut feeling.
But my gut feeling is to run and hide. And that’s the one reaction my intellect will veto!

My second instinct is to eat! Preferably large amounts of extremely unhealthy food and chocolate!
But I’m already overweight, out-of-shape and struggling with the fifth floor stairs. Another veto!

My third instinct is to shop. The materialistic relief of buying something big, fun and very expensive is so close at hand!
But I haven’t had a serious income since I went to Africa in Jabuary and following that instinct would lead to some excruciatingly long meetings at my local bank!

After that I’m out of insticnts, my intellect spent on analyzing and subsequently vetoing the above 3 options, I’m also low on brain-waves.

There is an imminent danger that that will lead to some catastrophically deranged, passtimes, such as getting exceedingly drunk and apathetic for an entire weekend, thereby achieving in one blow what my entire inteelectual capacity has spent the week vetoing: Hide in hangver land, put on weight from the combined calories of 15 oints of Guinness and spend the last of my disposable income (or should I say credit rating)…

Wow, that would be pointless, and fun……

Cheers

Do I want a masters degree? I have come into a little bit of money, which suddenly opens the option of going abroad to study. And people close to me, tell me I could probably get into some very interesting programs in the world of Technology and the Developing World….

In the past few months, many people have asked me about my trip to Africa.
And while it takes a lot to tire me of hearing my own voice, at times it seems a little futile to explain the same things over and over again.

Also I have gotten the whole, and may I say, excellent, experience at a bit of a distance now, and so feel comfortable trying to express some of the experiences in words.
I think there are a lot of things to say that may reflect negatively on the whole experience, and I would like to say from the start, that it has been a great trip, I would do it again in a second and it has indeed strengthened my belief in projects like

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the GeekCorps program, and what a gadget-loving technology evangelist like me was doing for 3 months in the relative backwaters of Accra, Ghana, have a look at these sites before you read on:
- The Organisation that arranged the whole trip: GeekCorps,
- The on-line diaries of geeks in Ghana: GeekHalla
- The company I worked with for 3 months: AfricaExpress

Oh, and pictures, as well as other accounts of this 3 month hiatus may be found here:
- My very own, badly scanned (thanks to the photo-store), pictures: http://www.geeks.krag.org/
- The great, and well-designed journal of my good friend and fellow Ghana-geek Jean: Welltempered
- The immense travel-log (and seemingly limitless photo-gallery of yet another friend and fellow Ghana-geek, Babak: GlobalJungle

Basically this is the story:

One fine evening in late may or early June 2000, the exact date escapes me, I was sitting at the office of my then employer, Icon Medialab in Copenhagen.
To say I was tired of my job was probably an exaggeration, but for a while I’d been thinking about other things. I had a great job at Icon, in charge of mobile Internet developments. A great salary and above all great colleagues. Nevertheless there were more and more days where I found myself wondering wether this was enough for me. Wether I was falling into the trap of work. Success means fullfillment in a sense, and it gives me strength to work harder, just for the feeling of knowing you are good at what you’re doing. In a way it is a desire to at least try and see if there is more in life.
I was good at what I did, and still am, mind you, and that gave me some satisfaction. I had great colleagues, fun, interesting, intelligent and challenging, in fact Imiss them now that I work alone, and that made my days exciting. But I missed feeling a pride in what I was doing. I wanted, and still want to be doing something special. To be trying something a little different than what everyone else is trying. Maybe I just need to see myself stand out in the crowd. Maybe it’s just narcissism, but there you are.

The fact is, that that fine summer evening, I was at work late, and my brother mailed me a link to an article on Slashdot. It was a tale of a small start-up working in the highly unusual field of bridging the digital divide. It told the story of how GeekCorps, a North Adams, Mass.-based NGO, was going to send IT specialists as volunteers to Africa.
Now, ever since I travelled South Amarica for 6 months back in 1997, I have been fascinated by 3rd world problems. I have often thought of volunteering, even starting my own projects to help. The volunteering never happened, because I felt that as an IT specialist, it was futile to volunteer for a well-building or water-sanitation project, and the part about my own projects never happened because, well, I don’t have what it takes to be a pioneer. But I had often said, and even written on this very site, that I wanted to volunteer, if I could find something that made sense to me professionally.
And there it was. GeekCorps, it seemed, was exactly the kind of organisation I would have dreamed up, if I’d had the guts and the creativity to do it.
So there I was, in my office in Copenhagen, on a spur of the moment decision, filling out an on-line application, to leave comfy Copenhagen behind and spend 3 months, doing god-knows-what in a country I knew nothing about. Oh, and looking over my shoulder to make sure my boss didn’t see me.

After that I more or less forgot about it for a while. Spent 4 weeks on vacation travelling through Mexico with my girlfriend, and kept doing the same old work. Until one day in october, when a sudden e-mail from GeekCorps meant I had to make up my mind, should I go or should I stay.
A tough decision at the time, what with my girlfriend having just been away in Germany for 3 months, me being about 85% of the way towards starting a company with 3 friends of mine, and all the other more practical things that such a decision brings on.
Having dreamed of something for years and having promised yourself “if only there was a way…” is such a catalyst for this type of decision though. I knew I had to do it, or I’d be forever asking myself how it might have been.

From that day on was a race of immunizations, getting rid of my apartment, packing, moving, quitting my job (not too popular that one) and generally busying myself with all sorts of arcane preparations.
And one Sunday in mid-January my flight left from Copenhagen, via Iceland to JFK and NYC, where I was to meet up with 3 fellow volunteers, and get on the train to Albany. The adventure had begun.

At that time, I still had no clue of what I was going to be doing, with whom and under what circumstances. I knew the name of the company (AfricaExpress) I was to work with, as well as a few key-words regarding technology. But it was enough…..

In brief the whole idea was to get 2 weeks of training in North Adams, Mass. followed by 3 months in Accra working with a partner in a local business in an attempt to transfer as much knowledge as possible in the 3 months available. Oh, and have fun in the proccess.

This is not the place for me to describe the 3 months, what happened and why, for that you should probably have a look at GeekHalla, our on-line diary while we were there.

Instead I wanted to write this to attempt to answer some of the questions I have gotten since returning to Copenhagen almost 3 months ago.

Many people ask me the same question: Did you achieve your goals? (asked in a fairly sceptical voice)
The answer of course, like with so many things, is an emphatic yes and no